this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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i could, but closing the lid turned off radios (wifi + bt) at some low level in a way that i haven't figured out
What OS are you using?
lmde on a seven year old laptop five years ago, i was already accustomed to wifi on linux being dogshit. energy management was even worse and for some time hibernation was not a thing
Ah, yeah, was there any particular reason you were using LMDE? Because I'm not sure what parts of systemd it uses (especially back then), but I always just edited
/etc/systemd/logind.confto haveHandleLidSwitch=ignoreand have had zero issues. Pretty sure there is a gnome GUI for changing this same setting,gnome-tweaks.I would assume the bad WiFi support was due to it being Debian and Debian being notoriously behind in terms of updates for the sake of stability.
to get wifi working properly in the first place i had to find a missing binary that wasn't packaged in any normal way and was only hosted on some dudes github so my expectations were low already. it got a lot better over the years tbh
I've been running Ubuntu on laptops for a lot longer than five years and the last time I had real WiFi issues was over a decade ago. That's why I think it may be debian related or based on your description, possibly a closed source driver issue. There's actually quite a lot of WiFi devices that use chipsets that we don't have proper Linux drivers for at all, and what exists are sort of hacked together projects that live on github. I've had to do this with every netgear dongle I ever had, the downloading and compiling drivers for it from github.
could be, there was more of these weird things that i had to do that i don't remember already because motherboard of that one cracked like three years ago. i also remember that stock driver for tplink dongle was limited and the actual useful one had to be gotten from github